The DiskStation DS214se is Synology’s economical two-bay NAS with the capability to host, share, and protect data and is optimized to be an personal NAS server running the ever incomparable DiskStation Manager (DSM).

Ubuntu Server 13.10 is out, and with it comes the 3.11 kernel with production-ready Bcache and dm-cache SSD caching options. SSD caching can help speed up NAS devices significantly by allowing reads and writes to hit SSDs before slower rotational media.

Ubuntu 13.1o is considered a stable release, although it’s only supported for 9 months. The next release will be 14.04 LTS with 5 years of support.

Information about other server package updates in Ubuntu 13.10 can be found in the release notes.

The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while evaluating four different hard drives targeting the NAS market:

Western Digital today released a 4 TB 3.5″ Red NAS drive, along with expanding the Red line to include 2.5 inch drives in 750 GB and 1 TB configurations. Storage Review has already published benchmarks for the 4 TB drive and the 1 TB 2.5″ drive.

The BitTorrent Blog describes how to get BitTorrent Sync running on FreeNAS.

So you’ve upgraded to a new computer. Congratulations. Now you have to decide what to do with that old computer. Give it to your parents? Reenact your favorite scene from Office Space? How about you turn that piece of junk into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device running BitTorrent Sync. It may not play Crysis, but it will provide you with a plethora of options including FTP, redundant storage, and most importantly, BitTorrent Sync.

One of its more frustrating aspects is its lack of an officially supported server component—Apple seems stubbornly unwilling to provide a real iTunes server, and so folks who would otherwise happily centrally locate a media library on a perfectly suitable NAS are stuck with islands of music.

Ars Technica provides a 6 page review of the Synology DS-412+, focusing on features, software, and pretty much everything you’d want to know about any NAS.

Other contenders in the home NAS space include QNAP, NetGear, and Iomega, but I went with Synology chiefly due to their reputation for performance. The DroboFS was the very definition of “easy to use,” but after more than a year the slow read and write speeds just became too much. After scouring forums and reviews to find a replacement, I kept coming back to the then-newly released DS-412+.